Authentic | Devpost

The future of Authentic
In Action on InfoWars.com

Problem

On November 7th, the Borderline shooting occurred in Thousand Oaks. Absolutely shocked to see Thousand Oaks next to the words "mass shooting" all over the internet, we tried to look for productive discussion on how to decrease mass shootings in order to find solace. However, all we found were factually incorrect argumentative comments and people labeling each other as "communist liberals" and "white elitists."

Proposed Solution

Thus, we created Authentic to help people stop basing their arguments on false information and come to an agreement on the science and academia behind each controversial issue. This will help bridge the political polarization in our country and promote product conversation amongst citizens so that we can solidify the past and present for a better tomorrow.

Minimum Value Product + Iterations

The extension serves to detect the domain that the user is currently browsing and compares it against a database of websites that are known to be either "trustworthy" or "untrustworthy." This is decided based on a database compiled by MediaBiasFactCheck.com's analysis on the factual reporting of the website source. If the website may be untrustworthy, we then display a banner that alerts the user, notifying them that they are browsing a potentially untrustworthy website. To remedy this, we provide a link to a recommended article that is relevant to the topic they are currently reading about from a trusted news source instead. We also provide users with additional links to articles should they choose to look for additional sources.

How We Built It

We divided the extension into five functions:

Database of credible source (extract list of URLs from mediabiasfactcheck.com)

Determine if website is credible (detect domain of current tab and compare to database)

Take title tag of a news article (extract keywords /[\W]/gi)

Match tag to an article from a credible source (create custom Google search engine and search keywords)

Add a banner to a webpage (when uncredible site loads, display a warning message with credible source options at the top of the screen

What We Learned

Building this web extension was a very challenge experience for us because we were not familiar with JavaScript. However, we were able to learn the syntax and accomplish our project with research, (little sleep!) and patience. Trough the process we also discovered many news changes we always thought were credible but were actually deemed as mixed factual quality by MediaBiasFactCheck.org which further proves how significant our web extension is for everyone.

What's Next For Authentic

Due to financial constraints, our custom Google search engine is limited to 10 website sources (the free tier). In our current version, we have a database of about 100 credible sources. For the future, we would like to expand our database. One way to do this is to implement a user feedback feature to allow users to send us updates of news sites. Currently, we generalize publishers as “credible” or “incredible”, but we would like to specifically identify articles and facts that are incorrect. Another feature we would like to introduce is suggestion of opposite bias sources. For instance, if you are reading about immigration on Fox News (right biased) we offer you an article on the same topic from a left bias source such as US News. Adding source preferences is also a feature we would like to implement in the future to personalize the experience for each individual.